What is FinLeap’s recipe for building a FinTech company? Interview with Carolin Gabor, MD

Interview with dr. Carolin Gabor, MD at FinLeap, the Berlin-based FinTech company builder that lauches several startups per year.

Carolin will be speaking at impact’16 fintech/insurtech that will take place in Wroclaw on December 7-8. To register for the congress please go to pass.imapctcee.com

Carolin steers the strategic development and further growth of existing FinLeap Ventures. Prior to joining the company-builder, Carolin was CEO of TopTarif.de and autohaus24.de, which were successfully exited to Verivox GmbH and Sixt Leasing AG respectively. Furthermore, Carolin has ten years’ experience as a strategic consultant at BCG, especially in Financial Services, and is actively engaged in advocating female leadership in finance.

What are your first impressions while working in FinLeap?

It is the combination of a very dynamic setting dealing with two sectors which are still far from a complete digitalisation: the Banking- and Insurance-industry. At Finleap, we put three things together to build a company: Entrepreneurial execution, industry expertise and technological capacity. Through the creation of our companies, we reshape the finance industry. We are playing in the same market than all the other financial players, but we are way more dynamic and we execute faster.

I guess you have a tough job with overseeing the projects in the venture builder, how you solve this?

It is more inspiring than tough. By being responsible for the growth of the ventures, I work really closely with our Ventures and get insights in a lot of different business models. I work with strong Founder teams in different competitive environments and a wide range of growth opportunities and challenges. A very interesting and rewarding task.

Have you ever been thinking of making strategic partnerships with banks?

Our approach of FinLeap is to work with banks and insurance companies on a cooperative level. We have already several partnerships with banks, they are our customers, e.g. at FinLeap, our joint venture partners, e.g. at elinvar or our investors. Especially our ventures have strong relations with banks, like FinReach, who are providing banks with a digital account switch or Savedo, which partners with different banks to provide their customers with the best fixed-term deposits in the EU. Furterhmore, one can find in our office a lot of top talents with several years of experience in banking or insurance. We are not looking for the best university students, but for the people with the best experience in the financial field. This makes that the average age of our employees is higher than in an typical start-up company, but also our level of professionalism is much higher compared to other company builders.

You have a model for initiating new fintech solutions. Are you planning international expansion?

Some of our ten ventures are operating already internationally, like FinReach, or Savedo, Billfront and FinanceAds International. The international expansion will continue Venture per Venture. FinLeap itself has strong partners in Switzerland and the UK.